It's time British cinema went to work on what psychotherapists would call its "low self-image". Or perhaps, should I say, the image imposed upon it by the BBC and the Film Council's Summer Of British Film, in their selection of classic British films to restore and present nationwide over the coming months.

What a sorry, retrograde, inward-looking, cliche-driven sense of nationhood is laid before us by their choices, many of them long since staled and drained of their power by four decades of reruns. All our national distempers and cultural fevers, circa 1954, are represented here: the self-deluding postwar victory complex and nostalgia for the great good fight (The Dambusters, Henry V); the post-imperial compensation fantasy (Goldfinger); the chinless emotional constipation of the English (Brief Encounter); our lovable and harmless eccentrics, gawd bless 'em (Withnail And I, Billy Liar). And one perfect, long-lost, almost unnervingly British masterpiece in The Wicker Man. Lists like this explain why foreigners make better British movies than the British themselves.

I foresee teenagers watching Brief Encounter and whispering confusedly among themselves, "What is wrong with these people?" and "Is he gonna make his move or what?" What will be their reaction to the name of Guy Gibson's dead dog in The Dambusters? Or the stentorian bark of Olivier in Henry V, which soon will seem almost as mannered as silent movie acting? Of the more "modern" material, Billy Liar is the tamest of the northern-provincial boomlet we call our new wave ("Is he gonna get on that train with her or what?"). As for Goldfinger, Wicker Man and Withnail, well, those 50 viewings and two worn-out DVDs of each will probably keep me going for now, thanks.

The first step we should take towards restoring some sort of national cinematic self-esteem (and sanity) is to dethrone David Lean - the man who twice presented us with Alec Guinness in blackface - and cast him down among the dunces where he and his fat-headed epics belong, stripping him of his knighthood and then gluing the medal to Michael Powell's gravestone, begging Powell's forgiveness as we do so. Then we could toss Brief Encounter in the burn-bag and replace it with A Canterbury Tale, which has plenty of interesting things to say about the sexually repressed English without being sexually repressed itself.

The selection reminds me of the American Film Institute's Top 100 American Movies list, one of those documents that petrifies rather than galvanises our sense of cinema. Any fool could do better, as this fool will now prove: A Canterbury Tale, The 39 Steps, Spare Time, Culloden, The Servant, Performance, Barry Lyndon, If...., Morvern Callar, Carry On Up The Khyber, A Hard Day's Night...

I could make another list tomorrow, twice as long, with no repetitions. And another the day after. And so could you.